Building in Public: Lessons from My AI Video Tool

Over the past few months, I've been working on an AI-powered tool to help creators edit videos using natural language feedback. In this post, I'll share what I built, the biggest challenges, key learnings, and what's next.

It started with a simple frustration: editing a two-minute video took me an entire evening. I wanted to describe the cut I had in my head and have the timeline follow along.

The first prototype was a messy pipeline of transcription, scene detection and a language model that emitted edit decisions. It worked about a third of the time — which was enough to keep going.

The biggest lesson so far: ship the boring parts first. Undo, autosave and a fast preview mattered more to early testers than any clever model trick.